How to sing like Brian Jhonson from AC/DC?

[Lief]

Does anyone know the technique he uses?

[Owen Korzec]

Head voice with distortion. Also uses lots of twang/pharyngeal resonance

[ronws]

Like this:

[jonpall]

Guys, those answers are not gonna help.

[Muzikant]

there are not lot of cheast voice in his highs,so basiclly light mixed voice,with some distortion and compression.

So he just push some chest in head voice and get that sound.I dont know how to help you to do that,main thing to sing like that is to give resonance in head,not try to push to much cheast up,also especially later in song "Highway to hell" posted by rowns sing very "airy" so more fallsetoish.

[joshual]

Just a tip:

When you want to mimic a singer, don't just listen, but watch!

Look at his head position, look at his chest, look at how wide or not he is opening is mouth etc.... that will help you a lot. ;-)

[MDEW]

I don't think that he is doing anything healthy. He looks like he is clenching his jaw, excessive contraction of the neck muscles almost compressing his head into his shoulders and he is using a munchkin sound. When I do that I am almost swallowing my tongue and keeping it reletively stiff. But, if you really want to sound like that........

There are better sounds for that style that are healthier.

[ChumelsVanCogle]

Does anyone know the technique he uses?

He's intentionally adding a ton of distortion. In the case of some singers, they will be able to produce of a rougher sound when going that overly low grandpa kinda voice, and I think in the case of brian johnson he's further compounding that effect by adding a ton of vocal cord distortion to the already rough sound.

This isn't exactly a technique you want to use. No real professional singer will use that much distortion even if they have a rougher tone. However in american rock music it has become somewhat of a popular thing to sacrifice some laryngeal power in place of adding pharyngeal distortion or vocal cord distortion. That's only useful if you want to exemplify this specific sound and don't care about proper vocal technique, and at any rate it rasps your vocal cords around just the same way it would with like a screamo technique.

[ronws]

Having watched a number of interviews with AC/DC, including Brian Johnson, he has a raspy, gravelly voice when he speaks, same as when he sings. In his memoirs, he never once talked about singing lessons. He was more interested in talking about all the cars he has had in his life at various steps. And his racing team. And the comedy of errors when Malcolm, who did not know how to drive, finally got a car, when he could afford one. If I remember correctly, Malcolm had to hire a driver.

[ronws]

Here's another insight into the sound of Brian Johnson.